Reading the Old Testament after Trent: Cardinal Robert Bellarmine and his Italian Predecessors on Psalm Four

Abstract

The Fourth Session of the Council of Trent (April 1546) included an affirmation of the authenticity of the Church's traditional Latin version of the Scriptures, while refusing to name together with the Latin Vulgate the Hebrew and Greek original texts. Using Italian interpretations of the Psalms, both before Trent and in the 1611 commentary by Bellarmine, this study looks for insights into the consequences of the Tridentine decrees for biblical interpretation in the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church. It finds in Bellarmine both ruptures and continuities with the work of Italian Christian Hebraists of the first half of the sixteenth century, and concludes that Bellarmine is a good representative of the direction espoused by the Council. In addition to his attachment to patristic commentary, he rejected claims for the superiority of the Massoretic Hebrew text, but identified with that older patristic tradition which considered the Greek Septuagint as representing the most accurate and inspired reading of the original Hebrew.